So I know I’m back home now, and it’s weird to continue posting. I realize many may think it’s time to move on. But after a month in ‘Merica, I still haven’t quite made sense of what happened. Numerous times I’ve thought about sitting down and writing a be-all end-all post about my experience of 27 months in Indonesia. But then I sit down, and nothing comes together. I’m still searching for that thread that ties all those disparate, sometimes jarring, and sometimes absolutely amazing experiences together. I don’t know if I’ll find it. So in the meantime, I’ll try and address the backlog of stuff I never quite got to. My hope is it’ll help me understand things now that I have a little different perspective, and that you’ll forgive me for a little nostalgia.

Can I interest you in some delicious Poo?

And in the tradition of quality posts, I give you one about Poo. For those who just gagged a little, I implore you to get your mind out of the gutter. Peace Corps service isn’t all about poop and other strange bodily functions. (Or is it…?) It’s about entertaining yourself on mind-numbingly long bus rides. I had a 6 hour death-defying trip to get from my site to the PC office in the big city of Surabaya. This is midrange for volunteer travel time in East Java, but long enough to test your mental capacity for sitting in cramped, sweaty, noisy dangdut-y, vomit-y places.

Poo up close

I soon found it helped to break up the trip in sections. One of my favorite trip markers came at 4 hours in: Poo®. It brought all my long-suppressed juvenile tendencies out. “Ha! Look at those people eating Poo®!” Snicker snicker. It was just the immature jolt I needed to get me through the last 2 hours on those forsaken buses.

But adolescent mockery slowly gave way to curiosity. What was this mysterious Poo®? Was it soft or hard? How did it smell? Was it contagious? Finally, I got my hands on a fresh bag of Poo®. It turned out it was tofu stick chips. So how does Poo® taste? Exactly how you’d expect: like crap.